by Helen Harris
‘“Well, are you or aren’t you?” snapped Mrs O’Riley. That was her way; never one for wasting her breath on being amiable.
‘So I told her to ask the gentleman please to wait for five minutes and then to come up and, although I felt so dreadful, I rushed around trying to make myself half-way presentable.
‘When Leonard came in, he looked fearfully solemn. “I’m sorry to see you lying ill in such surroundings,” he said to me. “I feel myself responsible. Is there anything I can do to improve matters?”
‘I was propped up, more dead than alive, on my pillows. I thanked him for the flowers and I asked him to pull up a chair. He sat down beside me. He looked ever so pale and serious.
‘“It’s very kind of you to come and visit me,” I said to him. “You must be quite worn out from visiting sick-beds. How are all the others?”
‘He smiled at me and he told me he hadn’t been to visit all the others. “It’s you I was concerned about, Miss Evans.” He bent forward and, ever so delicately and gently, he took my hand in his.
‘“Why, Mr Queripel!” I exclaimed. “Your hands are shaking.”
‘I forgot my own misery for a moment as I looked up into his face. He was white as a sheet and shivering. “Mr Queripel!” I scolded him. “You’ve got the flu too!”
‘He looked sheepish and he admitted that he had a touch of the flu. Then he held my hand a trifle tighter and he said something I shall never forget. “But Miss Evans,” he said, “could it be that isn’t the only reason why my hands are shaking?”
‘What a winter that was! We played in Newcastle and Scarborough and Sheffield. By the spring, we had to disband for two weeks for a holiday. I came back to London to my dear mother and Leonard went ahead to the South Coast to arrange our summer season. We wrote to each other every day. He wrote lovely letters. I’ve kept every one. That summer, we were lucky. We had the same theatre in Eastbourne for most of the season. In the mornings, and in the afternoons when we didn’t have matinees, Leonard and I used to walk for miles and miles along the seafront, right out of town and as far as Beachy Head. We had picnics on the Downs on Sundays. He took me to Pevensey Bay and, once, to the races. We both put money on a horse called Heart’s Desire and it came in the winner. We blew our winnings that night on dinner at the Burlington Hotel.
‘At the end of the summer, the company came back to London. We had a run of bad luck. We had to play in out-of-the-way places where we had poor audiences, and we couldn’t find a decent theatre for the Christmas season. There were troubles within the company too. Leonard had taken on a new leading man because he had decided he wanted to do less of the acting and make more of the directing. Well, bringing in an outsider had put some people’s noses out of joint. And the new actor was a Jewish gentleman, which naturally didn’t help matters any. He was a brilliant actor, a living genius, but he put some people’s backs up with his airs and graces. His name was Harold Levy. The ones who liked him called him Harry. He was as handsome as they come, believe me, although quite the opposite of Leonard. Leonard was blond and thinnish and every inch a gentleman, while Harry was dark and well-built and looked a bit of a bounder. When he came out on to the stage, you could feel the ripples. Well, Harry was one source of our troubles. And, of course, by then Leonard’s and my romance was out in the open. We had done our best to keep it a secret, but leading that sort of life in a company that size, how could we? True love will out. You can imagine the to-do that led to. There were unkind whispers, there was envy and, in the end, there were ructions. An actress called Clara Willoughby left the company. By the summer of that year, I was often playing our leading lady opposite Harry Levy. Some of them blamed me for our bad box office. They said I was taking Leonard’s mind off the theatre, that I was demanding parts which I wasn’t yet ready for. Which was nonsense. But they got their come-uppance when we went back to Eastbourne. It was already well on in the season, we hadn’t been able to get a decent booking before then, and we gave them our big successes of the year before: The Bird’s Nest and The Man at Six. I was Sybil to Harry’s Frank. Every night, we played to packed houses. Every night, I had curtain calls and bouquets. And, every day, every night, some token of affection from Leonard: little comforts for my room in the boarding-house and hampers of delicacies to eat in my dressing-room. On the last night of The Man at Six, Leonard went down on bended knee in my dressing-room and proposed to me. It was September 1930. In the spring we were married, in St John’s Church in Hackney.’
‘And you lived happily ever after,’ said Alison.
Alicia looked at her sharply, to see if the girl was making fun of her. But no, Alison looked enchanted. She had sat quite motionless throughout Alicia’s story and although Alicia had been absorbed in the telling, she could still sense when she had a receptive audience. She cocked her head on one side sentimentally. ‘Well yes, we did, dear,’ she said.
*
It was the third time that Alison had come to tea with her and the last two stale fancies were sitting in front of them on the table. At first, Alicia had thought that she would eat them herself between whiles, but then it had seemed an awful extravagance. She had thought of wrapping one in a bit of paper and giving it to Pearl for her boy, but she had decided it was too good for him. Pearl said he was causing her a lot of grief and shame by cheeking the nurses. It was bad enough while he was stuck in bed – he could still flick things – but after Christmas he would be allowed up and she shuddered to think what he would get up to on his crutches. Alicia felt mean once or twice, watching Pearl toiling away and knowing that she would not give her one of the hidden fancies. She came and worked for Alicia, after all, whereas Alison only sat. But she told herself that Pearl was far too fat anyway, that she would gobble it down in a moment and not appreciate it. So, even on the Wednesday when Pearl came in a perfectly matching lemon yellow turban that was just the colour of one of the left-over fancies, Alicia resolutely kept her mouth shut and hardened her heart.
Alison said, ‘What a beautiful story.’
Alicia looked complacent. ‘It’s not like that any more nowadays, is it? You’re in too much of a hurry for courting.’
Alison giggled. ‘Yes, I suppose we are.’
Alicia said, ‘Well, I think that’s a shame. Where’s the romance? Where’s the magic?’ She narrowed her eyes and leant forward. ‘Your friend, your Robert, how did he go about it?’
Alicia was deeply suspicious of ‘that Robert’. It seemed to her, looking at Alison, that he could only be a cad. Alison just didn’t look the sort to have entered gladly into that kind of a set-up. Alicia suspected that she had been put upon. She had already foreseen a future episode of their acquaintance, which she viewed as a sort of private television serial, in which Alison was turned out by that cad and came to her in tears for help. How tenderly Alicia would rescue her!
Alison said, ‘I’m afraid it all happened rather quickly. He didn’t court me for two years.’
‘He wouldn’t,’ said Alicia.
‘I mean, he didn’t rush me into it or anything. Everything just happened rather fast.’ She seemed to brighten. ‘It was love at first sight, I suppose.’
‘Ah,’ said Alicia, ‘like me and Leonard. Well, that’s something. So where did you meet him? Partying?’
‘He came to the museum where I work. He wanted to look at some old furniture and I showed him round. Then, the week afterwards, he came back again to look at something else and he asked me to go out with him.’
‘So his mind was made up from the moment he set eyes on you?’
‘Well, I felt that way, Mrs Queripel, but I don’t know if he did.’
‘Leonard used to say that I appeared on that stage like a vision. He had been auditioning all morning and I was last but one on his list. That moment when our eyes met over the footlights was pure magic; me in my audition outfit and him with his pencil poised, watching. “You got a lifelong part, darling,” he used to say to me, “You got a lifelong part.” And y
ou know what I felt.”
‘Gosh, our meeting wasn’t anything like as romantic,’ said Alison.
Alicia wanted to ask her all sorts of questions. Like, what were you wearing, not your fox, I hope? How old is he? What colour eyes? Exactly how long was it before …? But she found that she was being waylaid by her own digressions. She kept telling the story of herself and Leonard instead. It was, she conceded, a much better story, but she knew the ending. She couldn’t understand why it was, when she was so keen to find out about Alison, that each week she ended up talking about herself instead. It must be Alison’s fault, Alison who was so interested and grateful.
She cut a sorry figure, Alicia thought. She wore such funny clothes and she didn’t wear any make-up. Alicia could have suggested lots of ways in which she could improve on her appearance, because she had the potential. But she didn’t feel she knew her well enough to venture a suggestion. She wasn’t sure that she should bother anyway, because every week when Alison had gone, she was always filled with resentment. Why had she given so much away? It wasn’t time which worried her, or the tea and cakes, but private information. What had led her to share so many of her memories? She had forgotten the slippery slope of conversation.
When Alison had left, Alicia thought after her. She imagined her cycling back home to Holland Park, to her good-for-nothing Robert. She had difficulty in imagining Robert until the day she remembered a young workman she had once seen drilling a hole in her road. He had been dark and thick-set and powerful, wielding the heavy drill with careless muscles. Walking past, Alicia had realized with a shock that he was handsome, in spite of his filth and his hairiness. She had stopped beside the roadworks and, pretending she needed a rest, propped on her sticks, she had looked surreptitiously sideways to enjoy another glance at his manly torso. When she imagined Robert, she thought of the workman. For she had decided that Robert must also be handsome, in a coarse way. He was dark and well-built and looked a bit of a bounder. Just thinking about him in her empty front room, Alicia shivered. She saw brave little Alison going cheerily back into the sugar white house of her imagination where inside she, Alicia, knew the big bad wolf was waiting.
Given the chance again, would she have let Alison in when she first came calling? Walking up to Mr Patel’s to buy some biscuits when the fancies were finished, she thought it over.
Mr Patel welcomed her. ‘Back for more cakes, heh?’
‘Biscuits,’ snapped Alicia.
Mr Patel’s kindly face tipped from side to side conspiratorially. ‘So many biscuits.’
‘I have a visitor,’ said Alicia.
‘Visitor!’ said Mr Patel. ‘That’s good.’ He gestured at his shelves of biscuits as though, Alicia thought angrily, he was inviting me to bloody help myself. She was annoyed with herself for having answered him. She didn’t have to give him an account of her actions. She smacked the biscuits down smartly beside the cash register and waited proudly in silence for him to ring them up. Really, she didn’t know what had got into her; she was starting to have conversations with people left right and centre these days.
She was astounded when Mr Patel sadly picked up her biscuits and shook his head. ‘Biscuits are good,’ he told her, ‘but not always only biscuits. Vegetables are also good, eggs are also good, milk, milk products, pulses.’
She was so astounded that she couldn’t answer him. But all the way back down the street she was fuming, thinking up what would have been crushing replies to his impudent sales talk.
*
My first appearance in public with Rob, the first announcement to his friends that I had come on the scene, was typically enough also a party at Jean’s and Eddy’s. It was about a fortnight after our first night together. I was in a terrific turmoil. The euphoria over the reckless bravery of what I had done had given way to worry and uncertainty. Maybe, deep down, I actually hoped that Rob would then drop me; that would have confirmed my lifelong expectations. After all, the only other man I ever cared for, my father, also vanished. It would have confirmed my instinct, reinforced by my mother’s teaching, that men are not sound structures on which to build your life. But Rob seemed all set to continue. Everything he did seemed determined to disprove my black pessimism; he said why didn’t I keep a change of clothes in his wardrobe, he talked about what we could do together over Christmas. At Jean’s and Eddy’s party, he stood up for me.
Jean and Eddy were not terribly taken with me. And since politeness isn’t part of their code, I could tell it. In fact, none of Rob’s friends seemed especially impressed by his latest conquest. It was my fault really. I hardly said anything because they intimidated me and I behaved like a dim, dumb appendage of Rob’s, just the role they would most condemn.
It wasn’t only the age difference between us which daunted me, although of course that counted. I had never been in such a concentration of up-to-the-minute people. Here was a roomful of projects and pressure groups, movements and workshops, clothes of strident contemporary colours and hair cut in fashionable bristling shapes. Hung with my old jewellery and my flower-painted silk party shawl, I felt a little like the Ghost of Christmas Past. I told a tense blond man, Andy Ellis, that I worked in the Decorative Arts department of a museum and he said vaguely, ‘Oh, right, right.’ Then he drifted off and left me. Jean made a conscientious point of talking to me about toys and I suggested some lovely reproductions which I could easily have made for Adam Pluto, but she was disgusted by my suggestions. She didn’t want him to have such awful sexist role toys, she said, nor militaristic models.
Rob stood up for me. Although he was among his friends and high on the sale of his third play and obviously enjoying himself, he kept coming back to me throughout the evening to see how I was getting on, to help me out. He seemed oblivious to the obvious fact that none of them thought much of me. Perhaps he didn’t care. Of course, I thought miserably, I am only one in a long succession. What does it matter if they don’t like me, when I’ll soon have a successor too?
But Rob hasn’t lapsed from that early dedication at all. A year later, he still seems as determined as ever that he and I should go on. When I wake in the mornings and see his back, with the two moles which we call ‘On’ and ‘Off’ beside me, I still can’t quite believe my luck.
It’s been a funny time since his birthday, though. He’s having a lot of trouble with the last part of Print-Out where the computers start to take control, and I think it’s getting him down. I suggested he took a complete break over Christmas and we went away together somewhere, but he told me he didn’t believe in running away from problems. He wanted to stay and battle it out. He didn’t even notice the tacit offer I had made of not going home to my mother for Christmas.
A week ago, he came home early from his sitar lesson while I was out at Mrs Queripel’s. Usually, he stays and has tea with his teacher, Anand, but that day Anand had something on. When I came back, I was a bit flustered to find him there. I knew the moment I opened the front door that he was back because the Chubb wasn’t drawn, so I had the front hall in which to prepare myself, while he called from the living room, ‘Hi, where’ve you been?’
‘For a walk,’ I called back.
‘No accounting for tastes,’ he answered. (It was cold and drizzly.)
I came into the living room. Andy Ellis was in there too. I was shocked that there had been nothing in Rob’s voice which told me there was someone else with him. I stood in the doorway and I must have looked disconcerted.
Andy, who was sitting on the floor with his knees drawn up, straight away went into one of his ‘rigid with embarrassment’ retreats. He does this at the slightest sign of confrontation between Rob and me, even a discussion over ham or mushroom omelette. He can’t stand any suggestion of two personalities in proximity jostling together; of intimacy. According to Rob, the longest time Andy has managed to stay with a woman in all the years that Rob has known him is one month.
‘Hello, Andy,’ I said. ‘How are you?’
‘We were about to listen to an evening raga,’ Rob said. ‘Will you join us?’
‘No, thanks,’ I said. I can’t stand it when the two of them get all Indian and nostalgic. They went to India together the year they left university and, even though it was nearly thirteen years ago now, they still don’t seem to have got over it. It is part of the bond between them: the mystic experience and their adventures and Andy nearly dying of dysentery. Whenever the two of them get together and the mood is right, they relapse into this Eastern rigmarole, talking in silly sing-song voices and imagining another big trip one day, which would be to China.
Rob had made that horrid tea with cinnamon and all his Indian records were strewn over the carpet as he and Andy made their choice.
‘I’ve got some work to finish,’ I announced.
From the bedroom, where I took my sulk, I heard the plaintive wailing of the strings and the never-ending pitter-patter of the little drums. They irritated me so much that, for the first time in ages, I actually found myself looking forward to going in to the museum on Monday morning.
I started work in the Department of Furniture and Decorative Arts nearly four years ago. I really threw myself into it at first because, even though unemployment wasn’t nearly as bad then as it is now, I still knew that I was very lucky to have got such an appropriate job straight out of art school. I had a silly fantasy, too, of how pleased my father would have been if he knew that I was working among such beautiful pieces of fine old furniture. I concentrated terribly hard on the job, imagining myself as a renowned scholar in twenty years’ time. I studied everything there was to know about the objects in my care. I got myself a reputation as a beavering little dogsbody and that way came to the attention of Mr Charles.
I hadn’t noticed yet the wholesale cynicism of the museum staff, the affected self-denigration based on the fact that they only work with old things, dead things, whereas their wives and husbands and friends are out there in the ‘real’ world being teachers and probation officers and social workers, dealing with the raw material of the future. Scratch this cynicism and it’s only skin-deep; they really venerate the ‘old’, ‘dead’ objects in their care and some of them sincerely believe that they are better people because they work with historical treasures rather than with calculators and word processors. But it is the cynicism which pervades our working atmosphere. If the government valued us, they would pay us more money. No one, but no one, admits to cherishing the museum’s treasures. They make fun of the elaborate care with which they have to be treated. The ‘in’ word for museum exhibits among us junior staff is ‘the goods’. So, as the new girl, I didn’t endear myself to anyone by looking at the first things from the glass cases which I was allowed to handle with wide-eyed wonder and not hiding my thrill at entering an enchanted kingdom from which anything later than 1900 was excluded. Not to anyone apart from Mr Charles, that is.
